Bread board etc.

A sharp knife also works. Cut a very narrow V shape out. I prefer the matrix of holes board though.

You can buy plug-in timers for very little. A thermostatic iron suffers less tip burn than non-thermostatic.

NT

I use the solderless breadboard to get the circuit working then use a pc board with copper on the back that has the same pattern as the solderless breadboard. That make it real easy. Sounds like you a beginner? We are glad to help. here

You can Spice non-exotic circuits then go directly to a production-quality PC board. That should become routine.

Exotic stuff, like high-current switchers, picosecond things, picoamps, controlled impedances, don't work on solderless breadboards and may not Spice well; those can be breadboarded on copperclad FR4.

Serious things, like FPGAs connected to high-pin-count peripherial chips, can't reasonably be Spiced or breadboarded. They go directly to the ideally-sellable first PCB.

I do know of outfits that assume the first few PCB iterations will not work, and they are always right about that.

This is what I do...

...Jim Thompson

That style confuses me. And if you want to flip it over to change something or trace a connection, you have to disconnect all the cables and scope probes and stuff.

I prefer to keep everything in sight, over a solid ground plane:

We know our first iterations won't work (95% sure that requirements will change) but they'll work well enough for the software folks[*] to do their thing so it's worth making them anyway. It saves breadboarding parts we haven't used before and offers a chance to get the layout right (fine tune for EMI, etc.).

Naaaah! You can't see the power bundle in these photos, but it stays intact.

As for probing, I'm generally not constrained by any probe-type sockets... I just hand probe..

Some of us live in a slower world dominated by physical control systems, motion controls and stuff like video billboards ;-) ...Jim Thompson

We consider it to be a serious embarassment if we can't sell rev A, the first PCB. Since we have three serious design reviews (PDR, CDR, PCB) it's a group failure.

Over 95% of our first-etch boards can be sold. Maybe a blue wire or two.

We breadboard little bits of circuit, or new parts, if there's any doubt about them.

If you assume that the first board doesn't need to be perfect, you will need a second, or a third. Some people work that way, but we think that's sloppy and inefficient.

Yes, but we get to market first and grab all the customers. (Nah, I'm just kidding - but that is one possible drawback to perfection.) Microsoft used to do this all the time.

Here is my worst "Why did I ever build this?" project:

A super fast hi-Z experimenter's kit for my HP-3577A network analyzer. King size, LH0063 buffers and the whole nine yards. Painted fire-engine red (same paint I used for my 1st car), big double-shoe-box sized linear power supply. It worked great and I still have it.

That was at the beginning of my first self-employed foray, to be able to design and test baseband sections for Pulsed-Doppler. Turns out all my initial med tech projects later were imaging projects so this painstakingly built box never saw meaningful service. I did one small RF experiment with that and promptly blew one of the four LH0063 by accidentally transmitting 100W shortwave into it.

I couldn't bring myself to do it yet but some day I'll just have cut it loose. As we get older my wife's mantra has become "Just get rid of it!" :-)

If you feel like fixing it instead, I'll happily donate an LH0063CK to the cause.

You could show your better half this Paul Carlson video so she can see how well off she is. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Very kind, thanks. I still have a few spares in case I need a fast driver (they don't make'em no more like they used to) but I really don't see a need to fix that test box anymore. And it's only one of three channels.

Lots of memories there. At the RF institute we had that HP-141T analyzer and hardly anyone else could use it. So I kind of "owned it" for years.

Paul's lab looks very tidy and clean. When I showed my wife the late Jim William's lab bench and office desk she almost screamed "But I hope yours will never look like this!":

A board spin isn't the expensive part of the process.

One "blue wire" would be cause to spin the board. Manufacturing would have a double-jointed shit-fit.

Not everyone operates the same way. I'll concede that we often have way too many spins, though. One, never. Not possible.

what if you apply that mantra to your wife?????????

Nice lab.

Musta cost a pretty penny.

Andy

No, she is a keeper. It's still Wife 1.0 and no other plans :-)

In essence she is right. There comes a time when we have to downsize and then we don't want to have too much clutter left.

Actually not anymore unless you count the real estate costs. Nearly all of those boat anchor instruments can be bought cheaply because most younger engineers do not have the foggiest how to operate them. So they get ditched by large and small companies. Unfortunately sometimes literally. Pleany of stories where someone heard a vvrradda-BAM .. CRUNCH out in the parking lot. Turns out not to have been a fender bender but someone had just thrown an XYZ analyzer into the dumpster, with another stash of them waiting on the fork lift.

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the cause.

how well off she is. ;)

and they don't have to be old or outdated, if the bean counters decide they are worth the most as destroyed they go into the crusher

I wonder how many of them are still calibrated or even can be. ...even repaired.